Laptop Ubuntu project.

WallyBman

Okay, I dug out my old laptop, which wasn't exactly working, and I'm putting Ubuntu on it. I tried to get some more ram for it, but alas, my buddy, who runs a pc repair business on the side, had none. So this old Toshiba Satellite 1805-s230 Celeron notebook doesn't have any built in ethernet. Does anyone know it PCMCIA wired or wireless cards work under 7.04? I'm going to trade an old PNY TI 4600 for a pair of PCMCIA nics(wired and wireless), I'm hoping I can get them to work so I can set up internet through my PPC-6700. Urg, too much alphabet soup!

raquor

I recently tried a similar thing with my Toshiba Satellite 1805-s204. I couldn't figure out how to get the PCMCIA card working for wireless in 7.04 but I didnt try terribly hard and I was only using the Live CD which may have restricted me a bit. Aside from that everything worked well and ran a fair bit speedier than Win XP does on the P.O.S.

330 MB of PC100 RAM, a good computer, does not make.

WallyBman

Okay, I have a bit of a snag. What would have to be wrong with the computer for it to not want to take a kernel? everything else installs just fine, and all the other install steps go smoothly, well, other than the network setup, seeing as how it has no way to hook to the internet other than a damn dial-up modem. I'm using the "special needs" installer for 7.04, because of the low ram, and it fails at the end of installing the base system. After that, it brings me back to a menu that allows me to choose my next step, so I redo install the base system. When it gets to the point of installing the kernel, it lets you choose between three of them, or don't install one. None of those choices work, they fail just like before, and the no kernel one, of course, wont let you start Ubuntu(duh).

Here are the specs of what I'm working with:

CPU- Celeron 800
Ram - 128mb pc100
HDD - 15gb

Hopefully, that stick of 256 will get here from eBay fairly quickly, to bring me up to 384mb of ram. Also, I ordered a wired pcmcia card, and I'll be ordering an ass cheap wireless card for it. Believe it or not, the damn thing already has an internal wireless antenna in it, and set up to take an internal wifi card, which I have run across a few of.

Any ideas?

Another thing to note is the fact that it won't take an oem install of 98 SE or ME. It just comes up with errors during install.

As of now, I'm thinking the HDD might have bad sectors near the beginning.

WallyBman

Yup, bad hard drive, 9 bad clusters so far, and I'm only about 2% into a MS checkdisk surface scan. I picked up a 20GB on ebay for $29 shipped.

Question though, does the fixing on an ms checkdisk surface scan write into the meta bits on the drive that those areas are unuseable, or does it just move the data somewhere safer on the drive? In other words, if i wiped the partitions from the drive after doing the fix, would an ubuntu install try to use them, or would there be mets stuff there telling anything that is trying to use those clusters that they are bad, and to go somewhere else?

Apreche

Question though, does the fixing on an ms checkdisk surface scan write into the meta bits on the drive that those areas are unuseable, or does it just move the data somewhere safer on the drive? In other words, if i wiped the partitions from the drive after doing the fix, would an ubuntu install try to use them, or would there be mets stuff there telling anything that is trying to use those clusters that they are bad, and to go somewhere else?

Sounds like a job for a GeekNights episode! We can probalby do an entire show just on hard disk corruption alone. It's very cool!

WallyBman

Oh wow, nifty! Also, talking about how all the older disk utilities work(as in: how they directly interact with the drives, how they move shit around to check things, so forth and so on) would be highly informative. And I have absolutely loved the "how a computer works" series. I've been working with computers since I got my first TI-99 4/A back in 1982, and I still learn new things listening to those episodes!